


An Expedition to Nepal

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 04:58:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12880650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: Blair has been offered a position on an expedition to Nepal





	An Expedition to Nepal

**Author's Note:**

> Wrtten for the Sentinel Thursday prompt 'proposal'

 

An Expedition to Nepal

by Bluewolf

It was an interesting proposal, but one that Blair mentally rejected without a second thought.

He did not want to go to Nepal.

Yes, it sounded interesting - a six-month stay in a Sherpa village, the chance to visit - not the summit of Everest, but base camp, maybe one or two camps above that... see how the Sherpas worked, get the chance to ask mountaineers why they wanted to visit 'the roof of the world', knowing that the most likely answer would be 'Because it's there, the highest point on Earth'. But while Blair might have been interested in that at one time, he did not want to leave his sentinel for as long as six months - and he knew his sentinel wouldn't be happy if he did. And, almost more importantly, Naomi was in Nepal, and would certainly expect to see him if he was there; and he could do very well without her inevitable interference in what he was doing. She interfered in his life under the guise of helping him in some way - 'because that's what mothers do' - pretty well every time she saw him.

He loved her - but he had to admit that sometimes he didn't like her very much.

Sometimes he wondered if she would interfere less if he was still wandering the world with her, as he had had no choice but to do while he was still a child, but he knew that in that case she wouldn't interfere, because he was doing what she wanted him to do - spending his days in a search for 'enlightenment'. Sometimes he wondered what she would have done if her parents hadn't left her enough money to travel around the way she did, but suspected that she would have made her way to some Tibetan temple and become a nun there.

And he knew she would never find the 'enlightenment' she sought because she was too restless; she would never be able to stay anywhere long enough to devote the time to studying whatever it was she needed to study to find that 'enlightenment'.

No. Dr. Murdock's proposal to the anthropology TAs was not, for Blair, as appealing as it might have been at one time. A Himalayan tribe might have sentinels, he reflected, but his attention had been totally 'caught' by an urban sentinel.

Blair had been sorry to reject Dr. Stoddard's offer of a place on his Borneo expedition - but at least the Borneo tribes were jungle dwellers whose way of life could be compared and contrasted with life in the Amazon jungle, so the draw to Borneo was understandable. He felt no such draw to the Himalayas.

He did spare a moment to wonder what Dr. Murdock's reaction to the TAs who rejected his offer would be, but nobody could deny that Blair had more than one valid reason - his ongoing research for his PhD, the fact that his interest had always been the South American tribes... In any case there was space in Murdock's expedition for only three TAs, and while the man might well prefer to reject the ones he didn't particularly want, why make them all the offer in the first place? Why hadn't he just selected the three most likely candidates?

Perhaps it was the Rainier administration that had demanded Murdock put the proposal to all the anthropology TAs, though Blair couldn't think why.

Well, he would go to Murdock in the morning and make his excuses.  Meanwhile, he had some papers still to grade before he could slip away and resume what he was coming to consider his more important job, even though he earned nothing for doing it; working with, and guiding, his sentinel.


End file.
